


(Wo)man in the Wilderness

by frozennightmare



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Torchwood
Genre: Angst, Character Study, Gen, Missing Scene, Pete's World, Post Episode: s02e13 Doomsday
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-06
Updated: 2014-01-06
Packaged: 2018-01-07 19:19:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,768
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1123442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frozennightmare/pseuds/frozennightmare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>“What are you training for?”, a child asks her, and she replies quite honestly that she doesn't know.</em><br/>-OR-<br/>Rose Tyler's life, alone.</p>
            </blockquote>





	(Wo)man in the Wilderness

**Author's Note:**

> You know what they say: if you can't find 'em, write 'em yourself.  
> (Also known as I posted a request for a fic detailing Rose's life in Pete's World on my blog last night and nobody had anything so I went screw it let's do it myself)  
> Title taken from Man in the Wilderness by Styx (i am not a classic rock fan at all no no no there was a very specific reason for me picking that song so if you figure it out good for you)

Rose is always up early.

She races the sunrise like it’s a contest, as if the red-touched rays are poisonous, whirring around her tiny flat before it even begins to get light. It’s really and truly _hers_ \- Pete offered to let her stay with them at the mansion, but she declined after the beach. She is an adult now, she implores, nearly twenty-one, certainly old enough to buy her own place. She shouldn’t be bugging them anymore, _especially_ with her mother focused on Tony.

(Doesn’t matter that the mansion is massive and she could spend all day there without getting noticed. She doesn’t stick around.)

At four she’s locked the door behind her, bugging her neighbors with the sound of her feet on the stairs as they peer out the window, still making the first cup of tea. She spends her extra hours running around the city, getting to know it by the feel of the pavement against her feet, breathing it in before the world wakes, like a hungover drunk taking in more of what hurts to help ease the ache. The air is cathartic, biting into her with icy stiffness, pulling her out of any train of thought she might have with the sheer need to focus, watch where every step goes. By seven she’s crossed half the city, having watched the lights of early morning go out, being chased by the sun as it finally wakes up from its nap. She hides in shadeways and alleyways until it attacks her at last, that brutal creature, shining against the darkening roots of her hair and letting loose those who might recognize her face.

“What are you training for?”, a child asks her, and she replies quite honestly that she doesn’t know.

At seven-thirty she’s in the Torchwood locker rooms; at eight she opens the front door for a very debilitated Owen Harper. He’s a wild-eyed mess from the night before, fumbling with his keys and attempting to stutter an explanation before she tells him she really doesn’t care and turns the lights down so they won’t hurt his eyes. When Tosh gets here, he’ll have some wild party story for her; but until then he crashes on the couch and hopes Pete won’t show up and yell at him for staying out again.

He’s clinging to smoke, to something-in-nothing; they all are.

By eight-fifteen it’s Ianto, throwing a waterbottle at Owen’s head, missing horribly, and berating him to get up and get going. Coffee clings to him the same way Owen always smells like an old bar, some all-nighter gone wrong. At least he’s _awake_ , and that’s all she cares about.

Eight-thirty rings Tosh, Adeola, and Suzie, buzzing about something, and by that point Rose is digging through her drawers, Ianto’s coffee boy treat steaming up the air above her as it goes cold on her desk. _I don’t need it_ , she always reminds him, even though he makes coffee for all of them. She’s always awake.

Eight-forty-five brings in her father, fresh off nursery duty, perhaps the only well-adjusted person here. He passes out assignments and tells Rose off for not calling Jackie last night like she promised. (“I was busy”, she says in an attempt to justify it, and the collection of gadgets accumulating in her flat can certainly attest to that.) Owen bitches about something, Tosh proceeds to deliver a well-deserved slap, and her dysfunctional mess of friends she sometimes calls _family_ moves on.

Every off-hour is spent researching, checking the vortex fluctuations that Tosh emails her every night without fail, poring over sheer stacks of data from Jake down in R&D, fiddling through old dimension-hopper prototypes in an attempt to get somewhere. No matter how many pinholes seem promising; it never works. Sometimes she can get something through, a word, a phrase, but the gap always collapses before she can even tell where it was. Her cries into the dark get lost into an unknown crowd, a universe she will probably never see, and all she can pray is that they bleed in the right direction.

Build the bridge, and he will come.

At night she watches the stars like some people go to church, tracking comets and asteroids without any real purpose, pretending she could reach out and touch them like she used to be able to. Rose wishes she remembered what it was like to hold all of time in her head, to see every possible string and curl, just to be able to touch the majesty of the universe again.

And yet, with all those timelines under her control, why didn’t she ever stop this happening? Why didn’t she stop herself ending up here?

Add it to the list of questions she can’t possibly answer.

On a hunch she explores the possibility of another version of herself from this universe, even though the Yorkie bearing her name is still yapping around the Tyler Mansion. The words repeat themselves like they did back home, _bad wolf bad wolf bad wolf_ , a sign that she isn’t sure is from herself or another version. There’s no record, no names on the lists of the dead from the Cyberwars, so why should she have ever existed?

They find the TARDIS by accident, dying and locked in a Scottish field near the original Torchwood house. Well, a TARDIS. Not hers.

It won’t speak to her.

Adeola says that if she could get in, just for a moment, she could strip the remaining tech and probably finish her dimension hopper.

To Rose it feels like desecration.

Her key won’t work, although it fits in the keyhole just fine. This TARDIS hates her, lashes out at every chance it gets by bleeding into her dreams until she wakes up screaming on the Torchwood couch. Ianto wants to burn the thing, but it would never work. The false creature is as stuck in this existence as she is.

 _Let me in,_  she begs, just for a taste again, a touch of bigger-on-the-inside to give her hope. She can still hear her first Doctor’s voice in her head, _Just let it die, Rose. Let it become a thing on the street corner that nobody notices or cares about_ , and it all feels _wrong._

It never does open the doors, but it changes her nightmares to another tune; a different Doctor, wearing the face of hers but darker, more frightening, a Rose who still plays with the time energy like a toy to be manipulated at will. At the House she overreached, bit by the hand that fed her, accidentally erasing herself in an attempt to destroy the werewolf and killing the Doctor who tried to pull her out before it was too late.

 _Imposter_ , it snaps at her, _false child._

 _To me, you are the imposter_ , Rose shoots back.

She’s twenty-two years old now, and locked in a battle with an eons-old spaceship.

At Christmas Tony stands on the balcony and announces with all his two-year old pride that a “twinkly gone.” Rose watches in shock and then horror as Orion’s belt blinks out of existence before her eyes, speed-dialing Mickey and telling him to watch the skies.

Constellations stop existing, and the TARDIS gives one last dispirited sigh before opening it’s doors. _I am dying, finish me._

It was mourning, Rose realizes, mourning for the Rose and the Doctor it lost, fighting back against the “false one” like Jake had hated Mickey for weeks for not quite being the same person as Ricky. Now the universe is collapsing, and it sees no other thing to do then give up.

Rose is not quite as easily discouraged.

With the permission of the flat-lining spaceship she dismantles as little as she must; it still feels like defilement to rip anything off the console. But her hopper starts working with the stolen tech’s aid, and is it just her or are her messages going straight to the Doctor instead of into the crowd? Maybe the remains of the TARDIS feel bad for her, after all. He doesn’t see her, he never does, and she can only project her image across the dimensions (that’s irony, that is,), but then a rogue Time Agent shows up on their doorstep, telling stories of a warrior and his fearsome blonde companion, and while Jack flirts the pants off Ianto she manages to alter his vortex manipulator to send her across the dimensions.

(The replicated tech gets inserted into those ugly old yellow hoppers; hers is way cooler.)

Pete cannot describe his daughter as _hopeful_ ; she is something else, fierce and determined and stubborn in every sense of the word. She doesn’t waste her time wasting away on fantasies of what happens next after she gets back, she throws herself into her job with a wild dedication. She will get back, no matter the cost.

The dimensions she lands in always start right but go wrong at some undetermined point; like the one she lives in, the versions of the Doctor she runs into are always too different to be hers, wearing different faces and names. Sometimes she doesn’t see him (or her, once or twice) at all; sometimes all she gets is the autopsy report.

Then she hits a version that is most definitely hers, but he’s dead beneath the Thames, and there’s nothing she can do.

(Except manipulate the life of someone she suspects has everything to do with it. She did say she’ll do anything.)

For a while she’s glued to that timeline, stuck there as she tries to puzzle Donna out, dealing the fact that maybe this is the right one and he’s gone and there’s nothing left to do. She refuses to accept that, simply _refuses,_ to the point when Jack- her Jack- sacrifices his team to prove it isn’t. They’d met on a hop two years later for him, remember? Or at least, according to Rose.

Either he’s just changed her personal timeline in a minor way (and nothing changes in her memory, although the ‘time traveler’ might be protecting that), or he’s right and she has to fix this timeline.

Donna doesn’t trust her, as she should. Rose has doomed hundreds of timelines, hundreds of wrong universes, even if the resulting world is better. (It isn’t always.)

She wonders if the TARDIS now riding in her dimension hopper would call her Rose again, if it would recognize her as the one it had lost.

She is alone in the wilderness, trying to get home before the last star vanishes and the rising sun destroys her for good.


End file.
